“Where in the past some Members have sought to drive down housing numbers to protect the environment and satisfy the expressed desires of residents to see only limited growth and development this has arguably been a short sighted and perhaps self defeating approach. In terms of following through on the Government’s objectives, we are required to have an objectively assessed housing need which meets the identified needs of the district and then to purposively meet that need.”

Surely it is inappropriate for a senior officer to attack councillors in public for wanting “to protect the environment” and for standing in the way of “Government objectives”? And if EDDC exists ONLY to follow government objectives, what is the point of its existence, one might ask? And that of its officers, whose job is supposed to be to provide neutral and objective support, whatever party might be in power in the district at the time.

It’s particularly rich when it could be said that it is only thanks to EDDC’s self-confessed persistent failure to build enough houses over the past decade, and its inept performance when it comes to the Local Plan, that some councillors are trying to protect the countryside that EDDC itself has put at risk.

Owl wonders if councillors feel it worth a slapped wrist – an officer of the Council should not be criticising councillors for doing their job and who, if not named, can surely be identified .

The implications, as James Scott put it in 'Seeing Like a State', were quite authoritarian.

Only a select class of technocrats with “the scientific knowledge to discern and create this superior social order” were qualified to make decisions. In all aspects of life, policy was to be a matter of expertise, with the goal of removing as many questions as possible from the realm of public political debate to that of administration by properly qualified authorities. Politics, Scott writes, “can only frustrate the social solutions devised with scientific tools adequate to their analysis.”

As a New Republic editorial put it, “the business of politics has become too complex to be left to the pretentious misunderstandings of the benevolent amateur.”